Get your money for nothing and your... oh... wait.. I used that one already. Um... "Freebird!": Ads and Social Networking

 Scott Karp writes a great blog called Publishing 2.0 and he's talked several times about paying for advertising in a world where lots of content can be created and published for free.  What's the point?  Why bother?  Why not just throw some free ads up and let virality take its course?
It's a great point, but I have a few counters.

In the instance of Wendy's creating a MySpace profile, which anyone can do for free:

"What if Wendy’s won’t pay? Will MySpace have to tear down the page? That would be a great advertiser relations program — policing for unpaid commercial pages and tearing them down."

Actually, that's entirely fair and should be expected.  There are lots of instances of software and APIs that are free for non-commercial usage but paid for a commercial license.  If you are using MySpace to make a buck, doesn't MySpace have a right to take a reasonable piece of that buck?  There would have to be tiers, of course...     My local pool hall shouldn't have to pay much more than the price of a Yellow Pages ad for their profile.

Plus, going paid for commercial, just like Craigslist is doing for NYC commercial real estate, gets rid of a lot of spam. 
What's the value of paying?  Think of MySpace like the RedHat of the ad world.  RedHat packages free Linux with a service guarantee and support.  That's what I think of when I think of Advertising 2.0...  sure, viral videos are free to post, but you want more than just a single number--hits.  You want demographics.  You want to see what other types of videos people are watching.  You need data and there's where the MySpaces and YouTubes should really be ramping up.  Give me a whole reporting package that I can show my boss when I create a commercial MySpace profile that tells me a lot about the users.  What's the #1 band of the people who friend me?  Age?  Race?  You can't do that with a free profile but that's very valuable data.

That's one of the things we're focusing on with our upcoming consumer product.  Anyone can sell a virtual t-shirt direct to consumers or as a sponsored ad buy, but I think the difference is in the data and ongoing relationship you build with the users.  Businesses thrive on consumer data and I think that's going to be a major asset of Advertising 2.0.  If you can put a viral video in front of someone, cool... but what you really need if you are a business is a call to action to convert those folks into customers or at least some useable data.  The platforms have, need, or are definitely working on building out those tools.

In a world of human wreckage: Does MySpace have staying power?

When MySpace got bought for $580 million, I thought it was pricey.  Then I thought it was a bargain.  Now I wonder whether or not it will survive.  A lot has been made of the future of the largest social network.  Some people say that social networks have a natural limit to their size, because they cease to become cool at scale.  Others think that they'll never be monetized well, because monetization means overcommercialization. 

Will MySpace die?  Maybe, but not because it's fundamentally impossible to sustain a social network online.  I think there are some keys to sustainability for any social network needs to follow to last, and frankly, I'm surprised the networks we've seen so far do such a poor job at minding them.  They're not groundbreaking by any stretch, and frankly, I think they're pretty obvious.

Don't shoot yourself in the foot...the site has to work.  Friendster crumbled under the weight of its own initial viral success.  It didn't throw nearly enough servers and bandwidth at their early problems and the site became nearly unusable at peak times.  It really surprises me how often MySpace pages don't load or when features don't work.  It's not enough to be crippling, but it is something to watch.  If YouTube doesn't have this problem serving all those videos, MySpace shouldn't, figuring as much of the content comes from YouTube and Photobucket anyway.

Keep the bad guys out.  This is really the Achilles heal of MySpace.  Probably about 3/4 of the friend requests I get are from fake people.  Mass invites from bands are one thing...at least those are driven by actual humans who might actually have something legitimate to offer me.  The sexy webcam stuff I could largely do without.  It's always from blondes anyway, and I don't really like blondes.  :)  Filtering spam shouldn't really be that hard to do.  Part of it comes from defensive messures like sender flagging, but some of it is in the design of the site.  Facebook does a great job of keeping the rifraff out by keeping communication within networks of people.

Be the best a what you do best.  YouTube was the first to flash and had the most link dense UI, therefore, the best technology for streaming, discovering and having your videos discovered.  They still are.  LinkedIn has great tools for maximizing the value of your network, even if the site is boring and they don't do a lot of the contact management I'm looking for.  What is MySpace's core strength?  Self expression?  That job is outsourced to the freelayoutosphere.  Music discovery?  Music discovery is sort of accidently social on MySpace...land on a friend's page, hear their music.  Tools like Pandora and last.fm represent the cutting edge in music discovery and last.fm provides a very rich social dataset that could drive powerful and addicting applications on MySpace.  MySpace would benefit from innovating around this core functionality or integrating with a partner.  Popping the player out of the page and and allowing user radio stations and multiple groups in one player would be a start.

Drive usage through usage.  Despite the uproar, I think Facebook's mini-feed feature was brilliant.  By providing information on what your friends are up to, particularly because these are people you know, it drives more interaction through data exhaust.  MyBlogLog does this quite well.  People stop at my blog, they leave tracks, I get curious, I click, I'm on their blog, they click back to me or leave me a message.  Without trying, I wind up using the service more and more at each sitting.  This is what gets people sucked in and continuing to use the site, because it turns the experience into a living and breathing thing where things are going on that you don't want to miss. 

Commercial must be functional.  Brands are not my friends so if I'm going to friend them, there's got to be a compelling reason for it.  Whether it's to get digital assets like ringtones, or event dates, you need to improve my experience by adding commercialism, not distract from it.  Going deeper than just friend requests would be great. I'm friends with Casino Royale on MySpace, but that hasn't gotten me anywhere yet.  I couldn't even yank the trailer for display on my page.  It hasn't driven a ticket purchase yet...no ringtone... Kind of superficial relationship actually.   

Promote users. YouTube is becoming a place to get discovered.  MySpace has Cool New People.  del.icio.us had the /popular list.  Even Typepad has a blog of the day.  People want to see their name in lights, and they'd like a reasonable shot at stardom that feels like its in their grasp.

Communicate openly with users. One thing I loved about being on the VC side was the access to the creators of a web service.  When I didn't like something or I wanted to request a feature, there was someone to tell, someone who would tell me its in the works or why it can't or won't be done.  Craig Newmark accomplishes this by dedicating himself nearly fulltime to customer support and letting someone else run the business of Craigslist.  Facebook has a blog without comments and MySpace has Tom, who most people don't really believe is really a person...  at least you don't see him commenting on a lot of random profiles.   This is a difficult thing to scale, but I think it's very powerful.  I want to hear from the founders what they're working on, how they're solving problems, etc.  That makes me more patient and makes me feel like I'm being listened to.  Without open lines of communication directly with the staff, people give up and go somewhere else.

I hope MySpace does survive, because their tendency towards openness and scale have a lot of untapped potential, and I'd hate to see it die on the vine.  That would make advertisers take social networks, and the power of consumers, less seriously.

New Functional Avatar Skins... very cool!

If you've never clicked through to my blog from RSS and seen my avatar or if you don't usually play around with him, today is the day to click through, up and over.  We just released some functional skins and I'm featuring what we're calling the FAQ... its like a little audio profile.  Now, you can get a whole bunch of scenes in the same avatar.  Sweet!  This way, you can keep the avatar as an audio introduction, but also have a daily message that gets changed.

I'm blue, da boo de, da boo da...

P1020165, originally uploaded by nicolemarotta.

Adi, the CEO of Oddcast, throws a big Halloween party every year. Unfortunately, there aren't any good photos of my costume, but there's a candid shot that I was caught in that gives you a sense of it. I dressed as a Blue Man! :)

links for 2006-10-31

• Businesspundit: Sex, Politics, and Religion at the Office
  (tags: relationships business dating advice disagreement openminded)
• Mobility Site: Thinnest E-TEN Pocket PC Phone Coming Soon - X500
  My next phone?
  (tags: phones pocketpc)

Timeoutnewyork.tv photo contest win

Check this out... timeoutnewyork.tv is using one of my kayaking photos for their website this week.  Nice!

Girl power

Ok, so the worlds of finance, tech and probably to a lesser extent politics are still boys clubs, but I like to point out when my favorite gender makes some noise.

Found two cool new female bloggers...

A video blog on finance called Wallstrip hosted by Lindsay Campbell.  She's still looking for a "booyah"-like catchphrase, but Jim Cramer should still be watching his back.

Ashley Cecil paints politics and other newsworthy items... literally.  I'm really tempted to buy the Bubba painting...  Gotta love that little stubby thumbs up he gives...she's captured it perfectly. 

Also, BizDev2.0 is going to feature some very successful women in technology...  Catherine Levene, formally of the NYT Digital and now working with TheFind.com, Tina Sharkey, SVP of AIM and Social Media at AOL, and now a late addition, Zia Daniell Wigder from Jupiter Media.

Now if we could only skew the 90/10 boy/girl ration in the audience.

Some people think this stuff doesn't much matter, but for me, getting perspectives from a wide variety of people is one of the reasons why I blog and participate in these communities.  I hope we can see more of this in the future.

 

 

Technorati tags: women, gender, technology, politics, finance, wallstrip, bizdev.20, nextNY

Because there's never been a more appropriate time to quote Rage Against the Machine

Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me.

I think I'll go Google someone on Yahoo! now.

links for 2006-10-27

• Too much Junk Mail? | How Do I Stop It | Stop Junk Mail Now with greendimes
  If this is real, I love this... I've wanted this service for a while.
  (tags: junkmail snailmail mail trees environment)
• Taxi Fare Finder
  (tags: nyc Maps cabs cabfare)

Business plan - Work around here?

I love the lunch date... always have. It's casual, it's public, and it has a clear beginning and an end. No matter how bad it is, it will end in an hour and you're going to get fed either way. In dating, downside protection goes a long way. 

So, it's really struck me that no one has ever built a dating/social networking service around lunch or other work location centric stuff. I've had a lot of wacky ideas in the past, but this is one that has been bouncing around my head for a while that I might seriously consider putting some time and effort into. So if this is interesting to you, please do not just go off and steal it...I may want to help. 

Searching people by where they live really doesn't capture where they spend their time, particularly in a metropolitan area. For most people, five days a week, they spent at least eight hours a day in one spot...more time then they probably spend at home. 

Lunch dating also connects people along a different line...food. Finding a great place for lunch by your office is a big win, not to mention finding someone else close by who also likes Pakistani vegan organic pizza. 

You could branch out from lunch to include coffeeshops, the gym, happy hours.  This taps into what the keeps the Facebook strong...offline connections.  When you friend someone on Facebook, you see them in your English class.  Here, you could bump into someone at your local Starbucks.

The business model taps into the highly soughtafter local advertising model. Not only could restaurants make offers to local customers for specials and discounts, but think of all of the other things you could advertise to single people when you know where they work, what they do, and know a lot about their preferences. It's a goldmine of metadata. 

So here are some of the rules and features I think the service needs to have: 

First, I think you roll this out city by city, starting with New York. 

Profile creation should be easy. You should be able to pull photos in from URLs, or automatically from Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket, etc. You should also be able to suck in your music, movies, and personal interest data from these sites as well. 

The professional information should be pretty comprehensive as well...maybe a LinkedIn integration. You should be able to put in that you are a trader versus a portfolio manager versus a broker...not just "Finance". 

Outlook/calendar integration... Remember, these are office people. Plus, we'd need people to be able to say that they'd rather eat at 12 versus 2. Scheduling, and the limits people have on lunch, are important criteria. 

Privacy...people should be able to tell the system exactly where they work and be searchable, but not have all that info show up. So, if I find someone "two blocks away" I don't really need to know exactly where that is. 

Let the venue owners own their networks. Each restaurant should have a page which becomes its own social network. Maybe you work with a Seemless Web or someone who has channel penetration there to allow people who favorite or friend a restaurant to get special deals or vote for specials, etc.  Starbucks, Jamba Juice, and New York Sports Club could be major contributors to the site here in NYC.

What do you like to talk about at lunch? Work? Work off limits? Politics off limits? A few cues about what makes for a good lunch topic might go a long way. 

So, is this a completely ridiculous idea?  Think it will fly?  What else does it need?  I'd love your feedback.

UPDATE:  Itsjustlunch.com is not a competitor here.  This is a website that you join for free that is advertising supported.  Its Just Lunch costs you hundreds of dollars for an expert to match you up with someone... very different service.